Last summer, at the Arizona Cardinals’s first preseason home game, a historic sports scene slipped under the radar. Jen Welter, the first woman ever to coach in the NFL, came face-to-face with Sarah Thomas, who just a few months before had become the NFL’s first female referee.

“Picture the sidelines,” Welter said, standing next to Thomas, at the first-ever NFL women’s summit held in San Francisco ahead of Super Bowl 50. “And picture the moment when two females shook hands on the ground for the very first time.”

It’s a moment worthy of modern-day Rudy treatment. Except that women have been more than just underdogs in the NFL—they’ve been mostly nonexistent in coaching and officiating positions.

But the past year’s high-profile hires may signal slow change for women working in the male-dominated, multibillion-dollar organization. Last month, Kathryn Smith, a 12-year staffer at the New York Jets, became the first woman full-time NFL coach, when the Buffalo Bills tapped her to be a special teams quality control coach. (Welter, a preseason coaching intern, was not full time, and she left the job, as planned, after the internship ended.)

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced yesterday at the summit that the “Rooney Rule”—which requires the league to interview a diverse set of applicants for head coach or general manager positions—will be applied to female candidates for executive positions. And the organization points to the women senior executives in its ranks—including chief marketing officer Dawn Hudson, senior vice president of public policy and government affairs Cynthia Hogan, and senior vice president of social responsibility Anna Isaacson—as signs of progress. At day two of the NFL’s Women’s Summit, under way now, speakers include Serena Williams, Condoleezza Rice, and Billie Jean King.

“You can see women in high positions at the NFL, and you can aspire to be those people,” Isaacson told Vogue.com by phone. “When I started [in 2007], that wasn’t necessarily the case.” There was a time, added Isaacson, when women working for the NFL often got the question: “Oh, you work for the NFL. Are you a cheerleader?” As Issacson’s 3-month-old baby began to coo in the background, she quipped, “This is the new NFL.”

There is some truth to her comment: Isaacson serves as cochair of the NFL’s Women’s Interactive Network, a group of hundreds of women (and their male allies) who meet to talk about working motherhood and that elusive notion of work-life balance.

Many of these measures came about as a result of the NFL’s admitted mishandling of Ray Rice’s domestic abuse arrest in 2014, after which the league was widely criticized for having a “woman problem.” Still, the NFL’s inaugural Women’s Summit has been critiqued, by the San Francisco Chronicle and others, for being “long on ambition, short on substance.” The first day of the gathering focused on the impact of sports on women and girls—an uplifting topic compared with the NFL’s more controversial issues, such as cases of domestic violence and sexual assault among its players. (Isaacson points out that the league’s domestic violence and sexual assault advisers and hotline staffers are attending the summit.)

For their part, Welter and Thomas insist that their transition into the mostly male league was smoother than most would expect. “It worked exactly as I thought it would,” Thomas said. “I do not believe [coaches and players] saw me as a woman. I believe they saw me as an official.” Thomas does allow that there was one clear challenge: Where would she suit up before games? “I’ve dressed in a motor home. I’ve dressed with the cheerleaders,” she said. “Some facilities were phenomenal and had a separate room for me. Everybody’s learning.”

Thomas also tucked her ponytail into her hat at the request of the referees’ governing body. “If I wore my ponytail out, then immediately people would probably start to stereotype me,” she said. “They said, ‘Tuck it in.’ I did, and it really was no big deal.”

Welter said her cred as a longtime arena football player and coach—she was the first female running back in a men’s professional football game—helped players connect with her. “I think it’s even more of a challenge when you’re a woman who didn’t play the game because they can try and throw the ‘girl card,’ and they can also try and throw the ‘you didn’t play’ card,” she said. “When I was first hired, Michael Strahan said, ‘Of course the players will love her. She’s played more football than a lot of coaches in the NFL.’ ”

Welter also distinguished herself with unconventional coaching methods. She drew on her Ph.D. in psychology, she said, and wrote players motivational notes. Even after her internship ended—some NFL coaches intern four times before being hired full time, she tells me—Welter kept in touch with players via text on game days. “I would tell them, ‘I’m always here for you.’ Those are the bonds and relationships that we formed,” she said. “People said, ‘This is the roughest, toughest sport on the face of the planet. Guys will not take coaching from a woman.’ Well, guess what? They took it every day in Arizona.”

Both Welter and Thomas are stoic about their status as “firsts” in the NFL, insisting that they did not want it to distract from football as usual. “You don’t want guys to feel like they can’t be themselves,” Welter said.

There was one apparent moment of tension during Thomas’s rookie season, when, during an argument over a call, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick appeared in photographs to have reached both hands over her shoulders. “Bill Belichick weirdly puts his arms way too close to NFL’s only female official,” USA Today reported. (Though Thomas told me, “He never touched me.”)

Yesterday at the Women’s Summit, Condoleezza Rice suggested that minority candidates must somehow make themselves known to the NFL. “It goes both ways,” Rice said. “Those of us who are minority, [who are] female, really have to say, ‘I’m going to break through. I don’t care what the numbers look like.’ ” When I asked Welter what the NFL might do to make the league a better place for its female executives, coaches, and employees, she responded that they’re already doing it: hiring women.

“That’s all that had to happen,” Welter said. “The person to prove that it was possible.” She added: “The lead blocker is supposed to take the hits and clear the way for somebody else to score a touchdown. That’s what’s happening. A lead blocker is no good if nobody runs in the ball behind them.”